I’m under no illusions that any miLienzo.com readers spend all day every day with their eyes firmly fixed on their computer screens reading these very pages. But if you did happen across this site at the weekend you may have noticed about 30 minutes of downtime whilst I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

Alex King has released an updated version of Popularity Contest that fixes one or two bugs which arose from upgrading to 2.3, but unfortunately it is still not possible to run it error-free at the same time as Google XML Sitemaps. Oh well, I’m sure it will all sort itself over time as the plugin developers iron out the kinks.

Interestingly the new feature that had me most excited about 2.3 – the introduction of native tagging – is actually a bit rubbish. I use the Simple Tagging plugin which has a feature-rich tag management facility and also suggests tags when posting articles. WordPress has none of this which makes it a bit pointless – you can’t even see a list of tags, let alone edit them.

I’m sure the tagging features will become more sophisticated over time (and after more joyful upgrades), but for now trusty old Simple Tagging remains.

So apart from it breaking a few plugins and offering no benefit whatsoever, it went as smoothly as I could have hoped.

How’s it been for you?

Have you done the dreaded upgrade yet? Had any problems or are you wallowing in native tag heaven?

20 fantastic comments

I… Erm… Well, I bottled it. I just don’t have the time at the moment to fight with a whole new load of WordPress issues! I might even break with my typical ‘early adopter’ stance, and wait for 2.3.1 to come out!

I upgraded to 2.3 and it broke most of my plugins, especially now that they’ve dumped the old category table. All of the plugins I had that relied on that table, just stopped working — worse, they littered my pages with blabla table could not be found mysql errors.

I also converted some categories to tags, but then lost them as categories (so lots of broken links); I wish I could “unconvert” them, but don’t see that option — haha; I regret upgrading. I really should have either looked more closely at how 2.3 was different or just waited for the next instalment. Like Paul, I’m invariably an early adopter, but in this instance it bit me in the proverbials.

I couldn’t believe how many things actually broke when I upgraded; the same day I upgraded, my car wouldn’t start – must be WP.

One thing I don’t like with WP is an apparent push to get everyone to use those damned widgets. Now, some people love them; I’m not a great fan; I want different “widgets” styled differently, and to do this is more work that simply hacking my side-bar and simply calling a function.

I love WP, but I’m seriously considering Moveable Type. Anyone have any experience with it? Especially importing the contents of a WP blog into Moveable Type?

ps: I have no idea why I upgraded from 2.2.whatever; perhaps I’m an upgrade junkie, a tinkerer, with a voice in the back of my head whispering, “if it aint broke upgrade it…go on, you know you want to…”.

So, to answer the question posed in your post’s title, just one word, set in 672pt type, “nightmare”.

My upgrage was relatively painless. The only plugin issue I’m having is with the ’similar posts’ plugin (those six little links at the foot of each blog post, showing relevant content). Some posts are fine, but a lot of good ones aren’t, which is odd.

Paul – I think waiting a while for 2.3.1 is actually a wise mans stance.

johno – Sounds like you’ve had a nightmare! It would take a lot to get me to move from WordPress as I actually think its an amazing piece of software. For me the tagging feature in this update is a bit of a let down but I’m sure it will improve in later releases. Hope you sort things out though, and if you do move to Moveable Type let us know how it goes.

Barbara – Thanks for commenting. I’d not heard of Blog Desk before but I’ve just had a look and it looks like a useful piece of kit. I’m sure they’ll sort the problems out soon enough and release a new version of Blog Desk.

It seems to be some kind of downloadable text editor that sits on your desktop from which you can publish blog articles with no need to log in. It looks like its got some quite nifty image handling tools and it automatically uploads images for you, which I guess is its main attraction.

I’m too scared to upgrade at the moment too, but pleased to hear its gone pretty smoothly for you. I think I may need to bite the bullet and upgrade and change hosts at the same time. Wordpress is eating up my database space and 1and1 are so inflexible each database is a max of 100MB (even though I have 15 of them)

I’ll wait til my host offers 2.3.1 as a Fantastico upgrade. Sounds like people aren’t having too bad a time with 2.3, but upgrading to a new point release is better left to the people who need a new feature. I’ll wait til it’s safe to leap in.

So far, my WordPress upgrade experience has been pretty good. I did encounter an upload problem in which a few folders were uploaded into other folders. In other words, some folders were not overwritten like they were supposed to be. I fixed this and re-uploaded the files which allowed the WordPress upgrade script to properly update my database.

I knew about the tag importers being added to WordPress 2.3 but for the life of me, I couldnâ€™t figure out where they were. I eventually located them within the MANAGE-IMPORT area of my WordPress admin panel. After clicking on the importer for my Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin, all of my tags were imported into the native tagging features implemented into WP 2.3 I also experienced numerous wordpress.wp_post2cat does not exist errors which were being generated by the UTW plugin, so be sure to disable it once you complete your upgrade.

I want to give a very big thank you to everyone responsible for the automatic update notification feature. This is an invaluable time saver. After my upgrade was complete, I discovered 5 plugins which had an update available for download. The notification window provides a direct link to the plugin on the wordpress.org site where additional information along with the plugin files can be located.

Tara – Hi, long time no comment – That’s scary that you’ve got you’re running out of database space. Sounds like you’ve got some fun coming your way. I don’t envy you there.

mlankton – A wise stance I think. For info, all the plugins I had issues with have been fixed/patched now and I think this will be the case with most plugins. 2.3.1 might bring along some new tagging functionality too?

Jeffro – You’re right, the automatic plugin update notification is a nice addition. However, having just published my plugin I’m trying to wrap my head round the Subversion Repository which is how the notification feature works. I’m not sure it’s as simple as it should be.

Well, my upgrade to 2.3.1 didn’t go so well. It broke a couple of plugins and now my e-mail notification doesn’t work. Also, I’m not getting information from a couple of scripts, recent-posts, most-commented. I’m still searching for the answers. Overall, it certainly wasn’t worth the effort.